8 minute read
Wall to wall
Union members across campus voice opposition to University plans, find community
by Chase Hunter B.
In ASU’s downtown library, senior library information specialist Jackie Young helps students get information: taking students’ inquiries, researching topics and managing a never-ending shuffle of books.
When her elderly father tested positive for COVID-19, Young knew she must have been the source. She empties the book drop-off most days. Library administrators who established the quarantine period for books at ASU failed to follow guidance from the CDC who recommended a 7-day quarantine period.
“My administrators were only quarantining the books for three days,” Young said. Administrators thought of eliminating the 3-day quarantine, too, Young said, because of complaints from students worried about being fined for books in quarantine.
Young is frustrated with this sort of top-down decision-making. Many other ASU workers are frustrated too. So when workers at the University of Arizona formed their union, ASU workers eagerly joined.
Ken Jacobs, the chair of the Labor Center at the University of California, Berkeley, said the share of instruction by adjunct professors – who have little job security – at colleges and universities has “grown dramatically.”
A 2018 report by the American Association of University Professors found that only 27 % of instructional positions were tenured in 2016.
Young noted that during the Great Recession, the University made changes to its new-hire process to create a separate designation with less job-protection for workers.
Hiring more adjunct instructors gave the University more “flexibility” to lay off staff for budget belt-tightening, but Young said the University made this change without workers in mind.
“I've seen other instances of that during the COVID-19 pandemic with employees voicing concerns about safety and the University just going forward with in-person classes regardless,” she said.
A union, Young and others theorize, will make for a seat at the table. Not just one for professors and full-time employees, but for student workers, too. And though the union is barred from collective bargaining by Arizona Board of Regents’ policy, speaking collectively has power, said Richard Newhauser, a professor of English and leading figure for ASU's members of the union.
The new challenge is finding more union members.
ASU’s administration did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this article.
Origin of unionization It’s hard to imagine that just a year ago, tens of thousands of students flooded the campuses of ASU each day. And in March and April last year, it was hard to imagine returning to campus with the outside world so dormant.
But it was also unimaginable there would be momentum to form a union a year ago.
When ASU announced it would be creating plans to host in-person classes, Newhauser – a tenured professor who took a sabbatical year to avoid risk of COVID-19 – said staff members were “unhappy and suffering and afraid. Afraid of getting COVID, afraid of losing their lives.”
In the month before students would return to campus, Arizona was coming off its worst month in the pandemic as a global hotspot for new infections. The state’s 7-day average never fell below 2,000 new cases of COVID-19 per day, according to the New York Times database.
A new group called the Community of Care Coalition formed in August and called for ASU to “slow the fork down,” in reference to the University holding in-person classes that fall. While the Community of Care Coalition is not part of the union, their work aided in the union's attempts to organize.
“The state of Arizona is #slowingthespread and the rate of transmission has dropped. But @ASU is returning to in-person instruction too soon,” the Community of Care Coalition said in their first post on Twitter on Aug. 9.
Later that day, the coalition posted a petition urging the University to re-examine its opening practices and the following recommendations before reopening: 1. Establish public, scientifically determined metrics, informed by rigorous testing of all students, faculty and staff, that create a transparent standard for resuming in-person instruction. 2. Grant accommodations for all faculty, staff, and graduate students who have requested them regardless of reason. 3. Create a formal and transparent process whereby a committee representing all stakeholders (including track and contingent faculty, staff, and students) in the ASU community can advise the executive leadership team on questions pertaining to COVID policy.
“And out of that beginning, first at the University of Arizona and then later at ASU, people realized that a kind of loose coalition was a good start, but more organization was
needed,” Newhauser said.
In September 2020, the United Campus Workers of Arizona formed against the “austerity measures” implemented at the University of Arizona and the lack of COVID-19 regulations to keep on-campus workers safe.
UCW Arizona joined the national Communication Workers of America union and other higher education unions at the University of Colorado and the University of Tennessee.
By joining this group of unions, Newhauser said, the UCW Arizona union has been able to set up Zoom calls with leaders in other states and pursue what he calls a “wall-to-wall” union.
A wall-to-wall union seeks to unite all workers – from tenured professors and fulltime staff to graduate students and undergraduate laborers – to create the most robust solidarity possible.
All union members are required to pay dues, but with a progressive due structure, Newhauser said, the lowest-paid workers at ASU would pay as little as $8 per month for union membership.
“But even that can be worked out with the union,” Newhauser said.
Solidarity Young grew up near Detroit, a historically strong union city that arose in the 1930s with the automobile industry and the “Big Three” manufacturers Ford, General Motors and Chrysler.
“Unions made for higher wages,” Young said. “They made for better working conditions and they helped historically establish the 40-hour workweek, the minimum wage. They helped end child labor.”
But when she moved to Arizona, Young found that unions had a bad reputation. Arizona is one of 28 states with right-towork laws. She hopes that the pandemic, as terrible as it has been for working-class families, can also be a moment to change unions’ reputation in the state.
Right-to-work laws weaken the power of unions by eliminating compulsory union membership for new employees, Jacobs said. Without a robust union, the ability to collectively bargain with an employer is greatly reduced.
Newhauser, who used his tenured status to take a sabbatical this year and avoid risking infection on campus, said “it's incumbent on everybody who has job security to show solidarity with those who are in positions where that's not granted.”
Illustration by Nghi Tran
Since forming last month, the union gained more than 150 members at ASU and another 500 members at the University of Arizona, Young said, noting that the union “grows stronger every day.”
But there’s a long way to forming a wallto-wall union with more than 17,700 staff members on five separate campuses.
“That's the biggest challenge,” Young said about getting members to understand what a union can do for them, and make a financial commitment. “But you have to put your money where your mouth is. I'm paying $22 a month now for the union because I believe in it.”
The union bug The union voted in February for members of its steering committee. It’s the first step in setting goals for the union and strategizing the ways to go about achieving those goals.
Newhauser outlined a few goals the union hopes to accomplish: create campaigns addressing rising health care costs and lower health care benefits, make sure all workers are paid a living wage and that payment is adjusted with the cost of living, and protect workers from being fired without just cause.
“We want employees to have a voice where they've often been unheard,” Newhauser said. “We want true shared governance. In other words, what we're talking about is power-sharing at the University.”
Young was able to successfully lobby the ASU administration to review its rules on the quarantining of books — outside of her union work, she said. But being part of the union emboldened her to address her concerns and advocate for herself.
The unionization effort inside of Arizona’s higher education institutions follows closely behind the effort in Arizona’s K-12 institutions with the Red For Ed movement.
Through organizing and protest, Red For Ed was able to gain attention from the public and lobby lawmakers. And in 2018, Gov. Doug Ducey signed the 20x2020 Plan which would bring a 20% raise to public school teachers over three years.
“Those teachers, by coming together and acting together,” Jacobs said, "were able to utilize their collective power in such a way that they were able to win, in many cases, greater funding for schools and pay increases for teachers who are woefully underpaid.”
The unionization bug that Arizona’s public school teachers caught a few years ago seems to have mutated to infect the workers at the state’s colleges, Jacobs said. Public opinion has been moving in favor of unions over the past decade, he said, and workers are “newly organizing right in the throes of the pandemic.”
The union’s work is cut out for them. But with a couple of semesters of Zoom classes under their belt, Young, Newhauser and the rest of the union have adapted to creating solidarity digitally, working to change the system of decision-making itself.
“We're working to ensure that the universities operate in a more democratic fashion and listen to the little people like me and student workers,” Young said. “And that we have a voice in how the system is run.”
